Ruann Coleman is a South African sculptor based in George, in the Western Cape. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Stellenbosch University in 2012 and a Master of Fine Art at the same institution in 2014. His sculpture combines organic and inorganic material, wood, steel, and found objects, shaped, balanced and distorted into largely free-standing, un-monumental forms, with a practice grounded in play, chance and the weight and balance of the material itself. Twigs and branches recur throughout the work. He has exhibited with SMAC Gallery and Everard Read, shown at the FNB Joburg Art Fair, and held the solo exhibition Certain Lengths in Cape Town. His work has been featured in the Mail & Guardian and on the cover of Creative Feel.
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Contact René Scribante at rene@scribante.com or
083 627 6757
Holding onto a memory is much like listening to a piece of music. Even while it is still playing, it is already disappearing. What remains is rarely accurate, but a reconstruction assembled from fragments, emotion, and imagination. My practice begins in that gap between experience and recollection. Rather than reproducing objects faithfully, I remake them through memory, allowing inaccuracies, substitutions, and material translations to become part of the work.
In Please Stay, steel branches are fabricated freehand from remembered forms and allowed to rust, while polished stainless-steel trays catch the viewer’s reflection, folding them into the act of remembering. In Approximation I, driftwood is interrupted by fragments of engraved hardwood rulers. Instruments intended to measure with certainty become branches themselves, as though trying to calculate what was and what could have been. Together, the works explore memory as something continually remade rather than preserved, an encounter that cannot be held in its original form, only revisited through the materials, ideas, and imagination it leaves behind.